Search Results

“... is at times rather bland, but the documents reproduced (the lengthy ones with translations by Stewart Spencer) are well chosen to illustrate the man and his aesthetic attitudes. The goal of the book, Alfred Brendel says in his Foreword, is to allow readers ‘to paint their own portrait of Liszt’. It is, of course, an illusory goal, since no amount ...”

“... his entirety. Frances Lincoln has produced a beautiful typographic facsimile of the original and Stewart Spencer has continued the late Janet Seligman’s translation with equal skill, to a standard far higher than many more overtly literary books receive. The totality, however, makes for salutary as well as poignant reading. Why, Muthesius wonders, do ...”

“... to adopt a nationally apologetic and, hence, uncritical understanding of German history’. Stewart Spencer’s excellent translation allows Anglophone readers to be privy to a German discussion made necessary partly by historiographical trends currently popular in the English-speaking world. The First World War and Germany’s role in it is far ...”

“... chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering richness of Wagner’s legacy with an eye on ...”

“... Who​ was the most important 19th-century composer? Naturally, it depends on what’s meant by important: Beethoven overshadows them all, but Wagner generated more discussion, and more distaste. Few people would nominate Franz Liszt, because it’s usual to confuse importance with quality. Liszt was probably not the greatest composer of his time, yet his presence was everywhere in musical life from the moment that he arrived in Paris as a 12-year-old prodigy in December 1823 until his death in Bayreuth 63 years later ...”

“... Wolfgang Schäuble​ can’t have expected an easy ride when he moved from Germany’s Interior Ministry to its Finance Ministry on 28 October 2009. Angela Merkel’s new coalition with the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the free market Liberals, was committed to reducing the government deficit. That summer the preceding Grand Coalition – the name for a coalition involving Germany’s two largest parties, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – had made use of its large majority to write a self-denying debt brake into the German constitution ...”

“... that The Philadelphia Story is Berg’s favourite Hepburn film. He is, in a way, playing James Stewart playing the admiring reporter, and at one point Hepburn introduces him to members of her family as her biographer. Berg says, ‘Whoa,’ because at that point he was only writing an article about her for Esquire (and indeed he says that even Kate ...”

“... choice, Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, by George Stubbs, was painted in 1800. It hangs at Mount Stewart, a National Trust property in Northern Ireland. Hambletonian was one of a string of racehorses belonging to Sir Henry Vane Tempest, a landowner from County Durham. Having already won some important races, the horse was matched at Newmarket in 1799 against ...”

“... still tacitly or explicitly acknowledged its intellectual inspiration. Both Darwin and Herbert Spencer, for example, appear to have worked out their own models of biological and social evolution at least in part as a response to Comte’s insistence on the universality of ‘altruism’, co-operation and group solidarity in both the natural and human ...”

“... it rather lumpily, the film is about whether jokes can go too far, and what happens when they do. Spencer Tracy, Hepburn’s partner in this film as in many others, is a great accomplice in the articulation of this worry, but it is on Hepburn’s face, with its multiple ages, that we see most of the action occur. Hepburn and Tracy are married, both are ...”

“... of the electron) and from the distinguished physicists Oliver Lodge and Balfour Stewart. Since then the links between scientific heroes and psychical research have always been close. In his foreword to the two books, by Mackenzie and Blackmore, published to celebrate the Society’s centenary, Brian Inglis recalls the roll of honour among ...”

“... no doubt that Clancy knows the back lots and the business. For his B-list screenwriting client Stewart Stern, Clancy pulled off a coup by getting him big bucks and a big assignment: Rebel without a Cause. Afterwards, according to Clancy, Jack Warner pushed him against the wall – ‘He positively fire breathes Brut aftershave’ – and tore him off a ...”

“... decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the tax-payer) of the tenant with too colourful a professional life; Patrick Nicholls, suspected drunk driver; Nicholas Ridley, too loquacious ...”

“... Kretzschmar, a xerox of the kind of burly yet benevolent patron who first booked the Beatles.) As Spencer Leigh remarks in ‘The Beatles on the Reeperbahn’, his essay in The Beatles in Context, ‘Liverpool and Hamburg were of a similar size, populated with proud residents who regarded themselves as somehow separate from the rest of the country. Both ...”

“... own mixed feelings about film acting. Some movie stars – Ingrid Bergman, say, or James Stewart – are excellent in almost everything they do. Others have glory years interspersed with disappointments. And then there is Taylor. Although technically superb as a film actor, having been schooled since her childhood on the MGM lot, her performances ...”